By: Stephanie Caballero Benitez

In this article I will be reviewing and summarizing ‘Wendell & Wild’ from Netflix.

*Warning: This review contains spoilers. 

Short summary:

‘Wendell & Wild’ begins by giving the watchers a little background about the main character throughout the movie, Kat. We start with a memory of Kats’s father and mother at a brewery, which later on we are informed used to be Kats fathers brewery.

Leaving the brewery, the family gets caught in a storm, making roads dangerous. Kat suddenly screams as the apple she had bitten had worms in it. The scream causes her father to take his attention off the road and onto Kat. The father loses control of the car, which makes the car fall off the road/bridge they are driving on and into the water.

This is what leaves Kat as an orphan later on, and also into the criminal justice system where she is treated unfairly.

Kat is sent to a girls school to better herself and her opportunities of getting out of the system. Kat dislikes the idea of the school and finds out the only reason she is there is because the school was offered money if they accepted her.

Kat begins having nightmares about her parents. The demons Wendell and Wild are also introduced through her visions/dreams. The demons believe that Kat is a hell maiden who will be able to summon them into the world. In exchange for Kat summoning them they offer to bring back her parents from the dead. Kat agrees and makes a deal with them but to summon them she needs ‘bears-a-bub’, a plushie owned by Sister Helley. She steals the bear and makes the deal and sister Helley finds out about the plushie and the hell maiden mark.

Later on in the movie, we find out that Sister Helley is also a hell maiden which is why she was warning Kat.

Once the demons are summoned into the world they begin making deals with mostly everyone to be able to gain control/power. They make deals with Father James and Irmgard and Lane, the owners of most buildings in the town. The deal was for them to bring people from the dead so that Irmgrad and Lane will win votes in a council so that they are able to do whatever they want with the town.

Once they win, they begin to destroy the town. Kat sees the mess that this deal has created and reaches out to Sister Helley who offers to help. By summoning the demons, Kat also creates an entrance for the father of the demons to be able to come to earth. Their father is summoned and makes peace with the demons and agrees to leave them alone in return for Sister Helley to give him back all his children that she had captured.

The demons offer to help Kat make everything go back to normal. They fight off Imgrad and Lane and prevent them from going any further with their plans. Imgrad and Lane end up arrested and all the people who had come back from the dead begin to die again.

Kat gets peace with talking to her parents one last time and also gains the power of being able to see into the future.

Overall, I would give this movie a 8/10 because the movie is very well done and it seems like the entire production worked hard on this as it is a stop motion movie that took longer to produce than other movies (7 years). I also really enjoyed how the movie was not rushed at all. 

By: Jocelyn Knorr

‘Lockwood and Co.,’ a middle-grade children’s book series by the author Jonathan Stroud, is getting a Netflix adaptation. The source material has defied description repeatedly; I have pitched it in the past as “teenagers with swords and an unhealthy lack of respect for the supernatural,” and “Percy Jackson’s goth cousin from across the pond.”

Much more poignant than the middle-grade tag suggests, the series speaks to a past in which the dead—capable of killing with nothing but a touch—have come back to haunt the living. Curfews are enforced across Britain as the ghosts are most dangerous at nightfall, and ghost-hunting agencies have sprung up, desperate to capitalize upon the need for forces to fight the paranormal scourge.

The worst part, to me, is that only children can see them; ergo, thousands have been conscripted into the agencies as a sort of slapdash army, and sent out each night to fight back the dark while the adults sleep safely behind iron-reinforced thresholds. This has all been going on for fifty years when we meet our main character, by the name of Lucy Carlyle.

Lucy is an experienced agent, with a sharp Talent (which is essentially the ability to see and hear ghosts) and seven years of professional experience under her belt. She’s in London, searching for a job after being let go from her previous agency position, when she meets the titular Anthony Lockwood. He—and his friend George—run a tiny independent agency, completely free of adult interference. It is here where most of the series unfolds before us. For spoiler’s sake, I will allow the rest of the plot to remain in obscurity.

The live-action adaptation is coming out near the end of January; it is being directed by Joe Cornish, who also directed ‘Attack the Block’ and ‘The Kid Who Would Be King’. For those who have been scarred by book adaptations in the past—the ‘Percy Jackson’ movies come to mind—have no fear! Jonathan Stroud himself has a consultant role on the show, described in this interview. He’s cautiously optimistic about it—he has described the script as “brilliant,” and was looking forward to visiting the set at the time of the interview.

The 8-episode series is now in post production; ‘Bridgerton’ actress Ruby Stokes has been cast as Lucy Carlyle and Cameron Chapman as Anthony Lockwood. Ali Hadji-Heshemati rounds out the trio as George Karim. Not much else is known at this time, except for a specific release date—the 27th of January, 2023.

I would recommend this show to anyone who enjoys paranormal fiction or suspense stories, as well as fans of the Percy Jackson books. If they stick closely to the source material—and, judging from the official teaser, they will—it promises to have just as much heart, spunk, and action.

• Link to interview: https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/man-overboard-an-interview-with-jonathan-stroud/
• Link to Official teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_3rsK1YyPo